It is far from easy to pin down exactly what is meant in the literature by a mafia of the latifundia. Even in Blok (1974), mafia and mafiosi appear in so many different guises that one is hard-pressed to provide a focused summary: the mafia is defined as "associations of armed strongmen and their followers who exercise jurisdiction on the local level in conjunction with formal authority" (p. 94), and, more briefly, as "a pragmatic dimension of the state" (p. 96). The mafia is then described as a force for the internal settlement of disputes apart from any "conjunction" with formal authority: "Mafiosi provided a code according to which various groups in Sicilian society arranged themselves in conflict and accommodation" (p. 96); the mafia "grew out of the needs of all rural classes" (p. 97). We are just about to accept the definition of mafiosi as middlemen when they appear in the guise of campieri, ruthlessly collecting extortion money (p. 152). Elsewhere we are led to believe that they are rural entrepreneurs protecting their interests by violent means, only to discover that they operate as independent semiorganized thugs who simply force landowners to keep them as guards on the land (pp. 146-152). If we return to the idea of mafiosi as gabelloti, we are then perplexed to read that it was the gabelloti themselves who had to pay protection to others (p. 146). Mafiosi protect bandits (pp. 101-102), and landowners protect bandits (p. 108), but if we conclude that landowners are mafiosi we are mistaken, for we find that mafiosi also protect landowners against peasant rebellion (p. 181). It is hardly surprising that some people turn, bewildered, to the view that the mafia does not exist (see, e.g., Duggan 1988).

XREF: Demonstrates how a scholarly concept can fragment across a single author's work — a caution for anyone relying on one definition of any contested historical phenomenon.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 852